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I noticed that cutting half & half with water does not make it taste like whole milk. What is the reason for this?

I'm trying to apply some systems thinking to my understanding of ingredients.

Gabriel Fair
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  • How much are you diluting it? Have you looked at the fat percentages between the two? – Catija Mar 07 '18 at 23:10
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    Milk is not diluted cream, so no combination of half&half and water is going to give you milk. – brhans Mar 08 '18 at 02:16
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    Perhaps you could try cutting it with skim milk instead. – Micah Mar 08 '18 at 04:11
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    This is also why adding water to whole milk doesn't give you 2% or skim milk. – JPhi1618 Mar 08 '18 at 15:31
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    What is half & half? When I google it, I get images of Arizona Ice Tea, some KFC deal, maths and some TV show. Maybe someone can edit the tag wiki. – Belle Mar 09 '18 at 07:13
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    Half&half is half cream and half milk. FYI, it shows up on Google Images correctly for me. – Feathercrown Mar 09 '18 at 17:06
  • @Feathercrown I've never heard of it. Half&half in my region refers to meat (usually beef and pork or beef and chicken) and I thought I'd be rather obvious why you can't make milk from meat ;) – Belle Mar 13 '18 at 10:09
  • @Belle-Sophie : 'half and half' for dairy is half cream, half milk ... but there's also a drink called 'half and half' (aka. 'An Arnold Palmer') that's half iced tea & half lemonade, and in bars there's *another* drink that's a mix of two beers (typically a stout & something lighter). So it has way too many meanings to be a useful tag, even in English. – Joe Apr 12 '19 at 19:58

5 Answers5

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The difference between whole milk (or any milk, really) and half-and-half is one of fat content, not overall concentration. Half-and-half gets its name from being a 50/50 blend of milk and cream, which normally separate because the less dense fats concentrated in cream float naturally to the top of the mostly-water milk. However, milk also contains a number of other proteins, sugars, etc. that give it flavor. When you dilute half-and-half with plain water, you're diluting the fat content (potentially down to a similar range as contained in whole milk) but you're also diluting all those other flavorful components. You wind up with something that has the right fat level but not enough of anything else, and which tastes somewhat flat and flabby by comparison with proper milk.

logophobe
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    Skim milk + half & half? – jkd Mar 08 '18 at 04:28
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    Whole milk is 4% fat, half and half is 12% fat, so a 50/50 is at least 6% fat. So what you get is an overly fat, badly homogenized mix with half the flavor compounds of milk. – GdD Mar 08 '18 at 08:45
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    @jakekimdsΨ Yes, you can mix skim milk and half & half (or skim milk and cream) to approximate whole milk or whatever % you want. You can find "recipes" for the proportions online. – 1006a Mar 08 '18 at 16:38
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    ...and similarly you can dilute half-and-half (or cream) with 1% or 2% to get down to whole milk range, but the math is tricky. Whole milk is about 3.5% butterfat. – Lee Daniel Crocker Mar 08 '18 at 18:51
  • @LeeDanielCrocker It's not too bad, if `V` is volume, `C` is concentration the formula is `Vh = Vf * (Cf - Cl)/(Ch - Cl)`. So if you want 1 cup final of 3.5% from 12% and 2% : `Vh = 1 cup * (3.5 - 2) / (12 - 2) = .15 cup`. So use .15 cup of 12% and .85 cup of 2%. –  Mar 08 '18 at 22:08
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    Or you could just buy the right milk. – OrangeDog Mar 09 '18 at 12:06
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    @OrangeDog My toddler needs whole, my skinny ten-year-old needs 2%, my teens and I prefer 1%, and my spouse wants skim. Plus I like cream in my coffee. Keeping skim and cream on hand is much easier than having one of each at all times. – 1006a Mar 09 '18 at 18:22
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I've done some experimentation on this topic and I've come to the conclusion that one of the main flavors missing is sweetness. If you look at the sugars in half & half they are usually lower to start with than whole milk. When you dilute it to try to match whole milk you end up with quite a bit less sugars in the final product, even if concentration of milk fat is about the same as whole milk.

Adding in some sweetener to the diluted mixture makes the flavor much closer to that of whole milk. The actual amount of sweetener depends on the type of sweetener and your individual taste. A tiny bit of salt can also help. It's difficult to obtain a perfect match but you can get pretty close with this trick.

The reduced sugars can be exploited if you're on a low glycemic diet, substituting diluted heavy cream, half & half, or other high milk fat ingredients for other types of milk, then adding in lower glycemic index sweeteners.

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    And the name of the sugar in milk? Lactose - that stuff you hear about that some people have an issue digesting. – JPhi1618 Mar 08 '18 at 15:37
  • @JPhi1618 Yep, it is the main one. I figured that it wasn’t that important to name it. –  Mar 08 '18 at 16:31
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Pretend milk is Kool-Aid

The cream is sugar and the Mr Strawberry is a powder with strawberry taste but no sweet.

I am supposed to mix 1 pack Kool-Aid, 1 cup sugar, and 1 gallon water. I mess up and put in 2 cups of sugar. If I dilute down the sugar with a gallon of water I get the sugar ratio correct but now the Kool-Aid ratio is 1/2 what it is supposed to be.

If you dilute half and half to get the fat ratio down you also dilute the other stuff. Half and half is not concentrated milk. If half and half was just remove half the water from milk it would work. Half and half is adding cream to milk to increase the fat content.

paparazzo
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    Unfortunately, this analogy completely fails to anybody who doesn't understand Kool-Aid, which is surely more people than don't understand cream. I have no clue whatsoever what "Mr Strawberry" is. – David Richerby Mar 08 '18 at 15:12
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    @DavidRicherby Still the good will. Not going to argue with you. What do you need to know other than "Mr Strawberry is a powder with strawberry taste but no sweet"? – paparazzo Mar 08 '18 at 15:16
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    I think this analogy works. He spells out the three components as: Kool-Aid, sugar, and water. It is a ratio thing... if you know what sugar and water are you can figure it out whether you know what Kool-Aide is or not. – J. Chris Compton Mar 08 '18 at 21:13
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    @J.ChrisCompton Cool (aid). There was a time when I would argue this stuff but I have decided there is no value to it. Maybe it is more a US thing but don't drink the Kool-Aid is a term used by millennials that have never even seen the product. – paparazzo Mar 08 '18 at 21:22
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    I think lemonade might be a better example than Kool-aid. – Kat Mar 08 '18 at 22:00
  • @Kat Uh, Jim Jones had them drink Kool-Aid. – paparazzo Mar 08 '18 at 22:09
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    @kat Unfortunately "lemonade" is also one of those words with a completely different meaning on opposite sides of the pond. What we call lemonade the Brits call lemon squash; what they call lemonade we would call by brand name: 7-Up or Sprite. – Lee Daniel Crocker Mar 08 '18 at 22:22
  • @LeeDanielCrocker huh, TMYK. You could use both terms then and list the ingredients to clarify what drink is being described.. I think most people would intuitively understand lemonade being too strong or weak if the ratio of water to other ingredients is wrong. – Kat Mar 08 '18 at 22:38
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    The fundamental problem is this. If you explain cream to me, I might misunderstand that explanation, which is too bad but that's the way it goes. If you instead explain Kool-Aid to me and then explain how to translate that explanation to cream, I might misunderstand Kool-Aid _and_ I might misunderstand the translation. That's just more ways for things to go wrong. Why not just explain cream in terms of cream? – David Richerby Mar 08 '18 at 23:16
  • "this analogy completely fails to anybody who doesn't understand Kool-Aid, which is surely more people than don't understand cream." Citation needed (he said, smirking) – barbecue Mar 09 '18 at 03:47
  • I have never encountered Kool Aid OR Half-and-Half. The analogy seems perfectly clear to me. – Joseph Rogers Mar 09 '18 at 12:13
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    Just a reminder: [Be nice.](https://cooking.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice) – Stephie Mar 09 '18 at 13:43
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kool-Aid – paparazzo Mar 09 '18 at 14:49
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    I think it's likely the analogy will not work for many people. But I think the analogy will work with many people also, and thus this answer is a useful answer by itself for those people who don't understand the *other* answers and appreciate the analogy. – Joe M Mar 09 '18 at 15:45
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I don't generally drink milk and I have a small fridge, so I only by whole cream and water it down. This is primarily for baking and cooking, not drinking directly (I use almond milk for that). I don't want two (or three) cartons of dairy product in my fridge and I use heavy cream for sauces about 3 - 4 times a month. If you're just using it in small quantities, the preferred dilution of heavy cream to whole milk is 1 cream : 1 water. The appropriate mathematical ration is around 1 cream : 7 water to bring it closer to 5% fat content, but that will make the end result thin, cloudy water. Stick to 1:1 or 1:1.5 at the most and you'll be fine.

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Its true its not quite whole milk by doing that, But I must say it gets pretty damned close. If you are not a milk connoisseur you probably wouldn't know the difference. There is a much more noticeable difference between skim milk, 2% or whole in general vs if you tried to make the equivalent of those by watering down half and half. If you are using it for something like cereal, or making chocolate milk or that glass of milk to dip your cookies in or anything else where it would be used in conjunction w something sweet or sugary; watering down half and half is a perfectly good substitute if you don't have milk on hand. It blends instantly and its consistency amazes me. You could probably fool a lot of people that it is milk if they didn't know because it basically is minus a slight difference in fat and sugar content.

Matt
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